Accessibility Warning: "TOCI" elements are correctly linked to headings

[GeekyWhiteGuy]

A little context for our situation. We create our documents in InDesign, export to PDF, remediate and deliver. We recently moved from PAC 2021 to the new PAC 2024 (which is great BTW) as our accessibility checker which has a new "Quality" tab. The things shown on the quality tab are not UA or WCAG errors but, rather, are things that improve the experience for the users.

On our Tables of Contents (which we've done the same way for ever using the automated TOC tools in InDesign) we are getting a PAC 2024 quality error that reads "TOCI element links to an incorrect destination".  I messaged axes about the error because I was a bit confused by it and was told that the TOCI links need to direct the user to the Heading Level (H2, H3, H4, etc) but in our documents it's pointing to the page. This is a warning because if the user has low vision uses the zoom feature on the document to something like 300% they will select the TOCI and go to the top of their destination page instead of the heading which might be half way down the page. So they will be lost and have to figure out where the heading level is they are looking for.

What I can't figure out is how to link directly to a Heading Level. In the Add/Edit links options I only see Go to a Page. 

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

This is an all-volunteer user-to-user help forum, not Adobe itself.

TOCI hyperlinks in Acrobat PDFs have always been "page views," not direct links to a specific anchor on a page. So they always drop the user at the top of the page where the referenced text is located, not at the actual text itself.

You can share your comments about this shortcoming at https://acrobat.uservoice.com/  UserVoice is monitored by Adobe staff so your comment, bug, or suggestion will at least have a chance of getting read by them.

[Geenie S]

I'm having the same problem - have you been able to resolve this since your December post?

[GeekyWhiteGuy]

No. Still no answer.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

This is an all-volunteer user-to-user help forum, not Adobe itself.

TOCI hyperlinks in Acrobat PDFs have always been "page views," not direct links to a specific anchor on a page. So they always drop the user at the top of the page where the referenced text is located, not at the actual text itself.

You can share your comments about this shortcoming at https://acrobat.uservoice.com/  UserVoice is monitored by Adobe staff so your comment, bug, or suggestion will at least have a chance of getting read by them.

[nhash]

I was able to resolve the ""TOCI" element links to an incorrect destination error" by updating the alternate description for the link. Somehow it was captured incorrectly during conversion from Word to PDF.
(From the tags view in Acrobat, right click the link tag (that was flagged by PAC 2024) and select Properties to open the Object Properties window. From there, replace the text in the Alternate Description for Links box.)

[Frans v.d. Geest · Accepted solution]

Well some more insight on this: lets say you have three (sub)headings on the same page, then each TOCi link would bring you to the same page and to the top if the page instead of going to the place where the (sub)heading starts.

So you will need to create Text anchors for each heading. AxesPDF can create this for you but you will still have to edit each TOCi  link in the PDF to set it to that Text anchors.

If you use InDesign, you are in luck as Peter Kahrel wrote a script that does all that in one click in the InDesign source document.

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/accessible-toc.html

That said, this is about 'best practices' for now so you could also simply ignore it 😉